You Are Not Trivial

I used to think, you know, if I could help just one person. But tonight, I saw a flip side of this. What happens in the world if one person being their authentic self is precisely the thing needed by another person in crisis, and they won't make it through without your unique talents and abilities? Seen this way, depriving the world of your authentic presence could make the difference between another person getting along in life, or not. So I think to myself, if I don't share what I have to offer, what happens if it's not there when the next person in the world needs it? This may never happen, but if what I share is something required - however unlikely that may seem or feel to me - and I don't offer it, then I have allowed the chain to break simply by withholding who I am and what I do. It isn't about, "maybe" you can help someone. It's about what if you're the only person who CAN help someone and you aren't doing it? What if you're not there to do your part, for them? What if the authenticity inside you is the essential thing needed for someone else to survive? This kind of thing might be more common than we think. How many times has a life been saved because of a chance song or a happenstance smile on the street?

I have said that when I was in my twenties, I went out to San Francisco because I wanted to see the Castro district, some normal gay life. What I didn't say is that wlhen I saw those two men across the street simply holding hands and walking together, that gave me the hope, in the moment, that being gay could work out, and so I changed my mind about suicide and came back to Rochester. I had really gone out there because I couldn't accept that I was gay and I wanted to take myself out far from New York State so that my family wouldn't hear, and I wanted to see Castro before I did it. I was 20 years old, and I came back and finished my first college degree.

To this day, when I see two men or two women or two anything other than cis hetero couples holding hands, that simple act gives me courage and reminds me of that time in my life. A little thing, two people holding hands, but their simple authenticity has remained with me for the rest of my life. I think maybe courage is a good thing. But I think authenticity is eternal. That stays, and it ain't up to me, either. Just what I am coming to believe.

The Mystery of the Law

This one was probably the most fun I've had with a thought in a long time - occurred to me on the way home from an outdoor meeting tonight in park.

So what, exactly is the law?

I mean is it a fact? Is it a suggestion?

I think sometimes we go to the consequence of violating the law and claim that is its nature, but consider, if I drop a house on a person (as in the Wizard of Oz, for example) the fact that the house landing on the person (consequence) says pretty much nothing about who might have lived in the house, when their birthday was, if they ever served pot roast, what were the curtains before the ugly print ones?

So clearly it is not the consequence of the behavior of law that reveals its nature.

Now, scientific law is actually (usually) a verbal expression of a mathematical description of reality that describes what happens well enough to be useful in making prediction. But science ALWAYS responds to observation. Why? Because an observation outside a law's description is always either outside of its purview, or a counterexample of the mathematical description, or "proof" in a sense. Either way, reality either escapes the power of the description of such a law, or violates its foundations altogether.

So finally, what about eternal and immutable laws?

Well, if such a thing did exist then it would happen in every situation everywhere, to everyone, and under all circumstances. Thus, no one could violate it. Ever. Such a thing would violate the nature of what we supposed to begin with.

Now, in order not to get too lost in tail-chasing, it seems clear that law is not fact, else we could not be morally responsible for violating it. Also, it cannot be mere suggestion, because apparently, there is always a consequence.

I love this. Law is neither fact nor suggestion. Hmmm.

And yet it is.

Isn't this a lovely mystery?

Stay wonderful, folks.

Home

I'm loving vacation and getting away, and perhaps I am getting stuck in my ways, but already I miss my bed, my piano, and my bud, Ralph - although I'm not sure in which order. This being said, a cool thought for me is that the bed here is nice, I have a little stuffed dog willing to hang out and be cool, and there's a keyboard downstairs if I want, but this isn't home, and I'm saying that this whole thing is cool - missing what I miss - because it makes it clear that although this place is the home of dear friends, it isn't MY home. Last year, I didn't have that strong a sense of where my home was in order to miss it when I was away. So I like these feelings. They give me an appreciation for what I have and let me look forward to being back, because I love what I love. I can savor it.

It's nice to know that other places in the world are beautiful places to visit and experience, but at the end of the day, there really is no place like home. Sometimes I don't appreciate this as well as I do when I'm away from it.

Besides, I think Ralph sends little security updates to the stuffed dog here - don't know his name - and that one tells me, while I'm sleeping, that all is well back home. It's through the stuffed Jedi master animal telepathic link, which of course is far too advance for me, so I have to be told in REM state when I can give the messages my full attention. It's all very technical...

The Holy Lunchbox

Emotions are amazing to me. They are not the mere discrete points I learned to notice marginally from time to time in my early life as a young man. As I got older and experienced more of life, instead of perceiving the tips of a few waves every so often and calling them "fear," "joy," "anxiety," and so forth, I came to understand that my feelings were actually an entire ocean, an ever-present reality of my life's journey at the foundation of all I did and explored.

I suppose I was lucky to be an addict and alcoholic. If I hadn't been faced with the real need to find a way of life free from the regular (or irregular) application of recreational chemicals, I might never have done much of this work. As a person raised and immersed in society as male, my basic orientation to  gathering language revolved around how NOT to put my feelings into words. It may even be something that is part of the physiological makeup of the male brain and the consistent presence of male hormones from birth. Whatever it is, my entire relationship with language had been built around editing out my feelings, so I suppose, for simplicity's sake, those feelings I was shown how not to identify with language, I actually learned not to notice at all. This led to the perception that a feeling was merely a spot event to be managed like any other resource or problem. The only time a difficulty arose was if a situation gave rise to a feeling for which I could not readily find a room for in the halls of my internal language box. Those feelings were a real bother.

The more I practiced my writing and my music, and in recovery developed my prayer or meditation life, as I continued to form friendships, and grappled more with the dynamics of being a gay man in a hetero-dominated world, the more I came to see how profound the number of feelings there were, packed into any given moment or event of my life.  Out of self defense, I sought the help of competent therapy and I also began learning about the skill of "unpacking." When something happens in my life that gives me a powerful emotional charge - a level of emotion higher than the situation itself would warrant, I can go into that awareness and open it up to see what feelings are involved within me around that event. I treat this opportunity as a way to sit down and open up my Holy Lunchbox - a modest meal provided for me by my Higher Power, Godmom.

Sometime, it's full of leftovers. Other times, it's all fresh stuff. But mostly my Godmom packs me a mix. Of course, there are things I don't like sometimes. Carrots, for instance. I hate carrots. Shame is right up there, too. I have to say, though, that often, even though I don't like carrots, I prefer MY carrots over somebody ELSE'S brownies. There are some nasty brownies out there!

Anyway, the nice part for me is that as I use this little tool - the Holy Lunch Box - to work things through, a bit at a time, when the need arises, the perception of my feeling world grows.All in all, I'm glad that my Godmom packs lunches for me for when I am walking around in this school called Life. True, there are bullies, and authority I don't like, lessons I don't agree with, and frustrations with people I feel are unreasonable - like those who put the gum that gets stuck under my seat that I find with my finger when I 'm distracted and I run my hands under there and it gets all yucky.... But sometimes, it's mostly about me, and it's lunchtime. The unpacking, the eating, the pausing to take stuff in is all a human process. When I take the time to unpack my little Lunchbox, I always find it's a nourishing, proper meal, even if it still takes me a long time to appreciate the diet that I find there.

But yeah, I hate carrots. Could be worse, though. I've got Darth Vader fighting Obiwan on my lunchbox. That's cool. Some kids have Hello Kitty or Charlie Brown. Oh my god. What is their mom thinking, giving them stuff like that?

Peter and the Gays - a Biblical offering

Throughout my life, I have struggled internally with reconciling the fact that I am a man who has sex with men, and that I enjoy a relationship with Jesus Christ in my walk of faith.

I was raised somewhat Baptist, in that this was pretty much our family tradition, though we did not attend church much. Our family was from the South, so being Baptist was almost redundant. I don't even remember the first time I heard that as a gay person I was the "abomination," that those responsible for creating my society insisted that the God of the Universe hated me. Knowing I could not help who I was inside, I was shocked and terrified that God had created me to be an object of loathing, that my mere existence was a bother to Him and His universe.

For the rest of my life, that was a bell that could never be unrung. No amount of reassurance or excusing could make better the fact that a "holy" person had been okay with sentencing me not pnly to a life after death of burning for being gay and hated by God, but to a life in THIS body of being hated not only by God, but also by all the other humans who I saw supporting each other and everyone who was not my kind.

The act effectively placed me outside of the human race.

All this was done in the sacred quiet space of church after church after church. And it was done, I think, even before I was fully aware of liking men. Inside, I simply knew somehow that they were talking about me. From then on, walking into church made me feel like I was walking into a place meant to heal others, but that was meant to violate me, my soul, essentially like a continuous and public rape and humiliation by those who felt entitled to point out how they believed God felt about something inside the soul of another. They were entitled to say things that hurt little children, and to make them afraid of the Living God. Is this clear? that was behavior. There are some very serious injunctions about this in the New Testament.

So, I got to worship in a violated state, and since that first thing was somehow okay, any further violation must be okay too. The God of Love loved everyone else except me and the rest of my brothers and sisters living in outer darkness at the whim of church leaders.

I know Leviticus and Romans, and many of the other passages that supposedly talk about being gay. I also know there has been much work to place those passages in a kind of context to offer an alternative interpretation so that those verses do not have to lead to condemnation of we who are in the LGBTQ community. But I would like to offer something else here, a Bible passage that gives me peace in my heart with both being gay and being Christian, and allows me not to engage ever again with those who elect to condemn me. I have no interest in the argument, and no longer entertain for even one second the possibility that God condemns me. I simply reject this out of hand, eternally, and intentionally. I absolutely refuse the fight altogether.

This is my peace. Acts 10 presents the story of Peter's vision on the roof when Cornelius, a respected centurion, was sent to find him. In the vision, God said to Peter three times, "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." By saying and doing this, God created a way for Peter to be in relationship with Gentiles. Of course the Gentiles did not stop being Gentiles and suddenly become Jews simply because Peter came among them. Yet, God elected to NAME them clean, even though the law before had caused Jews to call them otherwise.

I took this in. From then on, I could care less if someone chooses to call me the "abomination" and claims to be speaking for God. I claim that God made me Clean. God joined me with this vision in the sense that He led me to it. I know this in my heart. I offer anyone else to consider taking this in and see if the Spirit in them affirms the message in themselves that God has made them clean, that God has seen fit to bless and affirm "all of the animals on the blanket."

What's more, I consider that it is entirely possible that had God not made a way for Peter to get past Old Testament Law in order to associate with Gentiles, the gospel message would never have even been conveyed to those very Christians who today see fit to condemn homosexuals. They would have been excluded from the beginning. God chose to do something else.

I belong to a certain fellowship that has a saying about this kind of thing. It amounts to, "I resign from the debating society."

Peace.

Voicism - A New Social Idea

I want to tell you a story about racism, and then I want to introduce a new idea that helps me understand a bit better the difference between the way I (a middle-aged Caucasian male in the United States) experience it, and the way I sense people in another demographic experience it.

Here's the story.

One day, I was taking the bus from the downtown of the city in which I live, to a Walmart in one of the suburbs. I observed a person of color driving the bus, and I watched his behavior at each stop along the way. What I saw was that at each and every stop at which a person of color was getting on the bus, he pulled up in front of them and lowered the bus to make entry easier. I also saw that at each stop at which a white person was getting on, he did NOT lower the bus, including for an elderly white woman in front of a local Community Hospital at which he not only did not lower it, he actually stopped a good ten or more yards before her on the curb and before the actual stop so that she had to walk down the curb and still climb on board.

I took this in, and I started thinking and feeling.

My first thought was to notice how angry I was, and how unfair I felt the driver's behavior was to the Caucasian patrons. My second thought was that perhaps I should report him so that he faces some consequences for his behavior. I mean, racism is racism, right? Well, luckily for me, I hadn't gotten to Walmart yet, so I had time to think about the situation a bit more. That's when I had these further thoughts:

If I said something to administration, he may very well be called to task for his behavior. What's more, it didn't occur to me at first even the POSSIBILITY that my voice would not be heard, validated, agreed with, and supported. I thought about that for a bit, at first quite smug in my assessment and also a little proud of being so socially observant as well as willing to speak up in the name of "justice."

But then I wondered something more:

It didn't even occur to me I would NOT be listened to.
It did not enter my mind the possibility that I would be disrespected or questioned in sharing what I saw.
It was true to me that racism was racism, no matter the races involved.
So, what would it be like for me if I had grown up in a demographic such that when speaking up against the same injustices I was now seeing, I experienced NOT being respected in expressing those feelings. In other words, what if I had to feel all those same things, but had no voice in the world that was allowed to express them? What if instead of being respected and validated for sharing my feelings, experience, and views, I was instead contradicted, relativized, or treated as if my experience could not be a different one because someone in the dominant culture chose to force the idea that the experience was the same because they said so? Or because they didn't want to be bothered?

What would my experience of racism  be then?

Today, I decided to coin the term, "Voicism."

So what is it?

Simply put, "Voicism" is the name I give to the mentality or attitude that when one person decides to express some perspective, or say a thing, another person feels entitled to correct it, change it, relativize it, or "make it about them."

Let's look at an example.

A bit ago, there was the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Very quickly, a kind of counterculture emerged that effectively responded with "Yeah, but, all lives matter." Now, what happened there in light of the idea of Voicism?

The idea that it is okay to do what was done by a white counterculture seems clearly to have been based on the idea that there is no special experience to the community of color that the other demographics do not also experience. It in validates the very need to say it - a powerful tool of voicism. Don't take away just the words, but try to negate that the need to say them isn't real or is crazy or somehow threatening. In such a context, the very act of expressing the need and pain is couched in such a way as to make it appear to be a threat to the world. It is a nifty, devious, and powerfully violent trick, and it attempts to take away the foundation from which self-expression arises: human need. If I deny you have a need, I don't have to have a conscience about not helping. In effect, I make the problem "disappear." This is insane. One human being cannot determine for another what their needs are. The very idea is blatantly dehumanizing.

As my story shows, even though racism is racism in a sense, the assumption that a person in the dominant culture experiences racism and lives with it in the same way a person in the nondominant culture does is not a reasonable one at all. The comfort in making this "leap" rests primarily on the fact that such a social leap has been safe enough because the person has been immersed in a dominant culture that allows it. Not everyone is so lucky. In fact, it now seems that such an assumption is naive to the point of being an oblivious and abusive perpetuation of the entitlement of voice. And all of us feel the effect. When it is done to us, the ground has been cut from beneath our feet by taking away one of the primary means by which a human being participates in world culture.

When one person takes the perspective of another and corrects it or changes it in any significant way, they have effectively stolen what was said by the other person and forced it to become a tool for their own self-expression, their own end. A person decides that the other person "should" speak for them, and they treat that person as if their own need to be heard is so important that it is okay to warp what another person says so that they themselves can feel heard. Thus, one person is forced to be the voice of another. It is a violent act.

Now, what's the consequence?

Well, in effect, the first person's voice disappears entirely and the act is pushed through with a kind of sneaky social force that makes such a behavior "reasonable" or "practical." But the harm is always the same.

The Black Lives Matter was not a movement to say why others' lives don't. Rather, it was an effort to give voice to the voiceless. And what did we see? Those who already had a voice saw no problem whatsoever with co-opting (stealing) the initial sentiment to serve their own needs and ends. This gave us the "All Lives Matter" gig.

Instead of saying something like, this hurts me and frightens me, and that it feels like "Black Lives Matter" is trying to knock me down since I'm not a Black person - which would have required some courage, some vulnerability, and a willingness to step out of social laziness, apathy, and lethargy (whether or not the perception of the intention was accurate) - an alternative slogan was created in order to express what they felt "should really be being said." It was a passive-aggressive way which not only affirmed the dominant culture by embracing its own entitlement of voice, but also directly damaged the power of the original voice which spoke the Black slogan, as well as violating the ingrity of its intention by never recognizing it to begin with.

This act showed no responsibility whatsoever for even discovering what the intention might be, let alone affirming it or intentionally making a space for it in the public sphere, inviolate.

When one person corrects another person's speech, modifies it, decides they know how to say a thing for another person without being asked, presume to know what another person's problem is, what they feel, what such things mean or mean for that person's life - no matter how well-intentioned or delusional they might be - they are speaking from an entitled point of view. It is an exercise in the abuse of power. Something in them makes it okay for them to speak for another human being, decide what their truth is, and how they should say it. It is a violation.

Granted, when it is children being taught how to speak or a student in a class being educated, this sort of thing is probably to be expected. But outside of this, and between grown adults - especially of different backgrounds and cultures - it feels like an inherently violent move, and I judge it as such. That's right. I said judge.

It is true, in a way, that racism is racism, however, if you have no voice in a society, or if a dominant culture continually uses the dynamics of Voicism to control your speech or method of self-expression, the oppression is quite real. We may experience the same thing as human beings, but not all of us feel safe enough to speak up precisely because our voice has been violated for so long.